Preparation of food is time consuming. Using the right amount of ingredients, and mixing of the ingredients in the correct order and the timing of the individual processes plays a vital role in preparing tasty and nutritious food.
Skills required for preparing different cuisines are different. But the same three operations are universal. Step one: Getting the right ingredients and quantity of those individual ingredients, Step two: Converting from whole ingredient to smaller pieces and Step three: Cooking it using the appropriate method of heating. These are the three basic steps used in preparing most of the dishes of all cuisines. These three steps are basis of more than one thousand dishes that have been researched for this project.
U.S. Patent application no. 2004/0173103 A1 provides automatic cooking, however, the main drawback of the system is that they assume that the raw ingredients are already cut from the “whole” form or they rely on frozen cut vegetables/meat which is not healthy and does not taste good. There is no mechanism to convert from the whole vegetable or meat to smaller pieces. Secondly, it does not have the mechanism to initiate the cooking remotely via a mobile phone. Thirdly, a user cannot create new recipe. Only preprogrammed set of recipes can be cooked. Fourth, to alter the preprogrammed recipe, one has to have expert knowledge on workings of the PLC. Suppose the user does not like too much spice or salt or wants to add additional ingredient, it cannot be altered in these existing inventions, without altering the program by an expert.
Typically, most of the cooking effort and time is spent on the preparation of the ingredients which some of these patents do not provide. They obtain already cut ingredients and cook it but does not provide ‘full’ cooking system as they claim. ‘Full’ cooking systems should involve the ingredients preparation process. They should provide the process from converting the recipe instructions to controller-motor instructions without the intervention of complex programming changes.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,276,505 B2 discloses a mechanism to convert from ‘whole’ form to smaller pieces, It requires high precision and complicated programming of the robotic arm. If user needs to provide a little variation to the dish being prepared, a well trained robotic programmer has to spend time to make a small change in any of the tasks. It involves a change in the programming or new program for new recipes.
US patent application no. 2003/0037681 A1 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,957,111 B2—comes close in delivering the ingredients from a storage area and provides a way of receiving data like number of servings, starting time for preparation of food from a remote source by using residential home gateway—X10 protocol in particular. However, that patent application and patent fails in providing the mechanism of doing the entire process for various dishes. It provides a mechanism for preparing cooked rice only but generalizes for other dishes. One of the three main steps for many recipes is converting the whole ingredient from bigger form to smaller desirable forms. Nowhere in the patent do they specify a mechanism to do it.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,132,914 A provides the ability to cook French fries, chicken nuggets, fish filets and chicken patties from uncooked potato pieces. There is no mechanism to make the uncooked chopped French fries from the raw ingredients—whole potato. That is, there is no cutting mechanism. Same goes for chicken nuggets/patties and fish filets.
Additionally, none of the known patents or patent applications mentioned provides a way to set up a weekly menu of dishes and also does not provide a way to add a new recipe into the system or to download a recipe. Most importantly there is no mechanism for converting the recipe instructions into device controller instructions.